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Wealthy, powerful people think magazines are the coolest, Nielsen study shows

New insights from Nielsen on New Zealand’s business decision makers indicates that reading a magazine is one of the movers and shakers’ favourite ways to consume media.

New Zealand’s ‘Business Decision Makers’ as defined by Nielsen are a demographic numbering about 756,000 people around the country.

These people are mostly educated, mostly male, identify as European/Kiwi, and have an average personal income of $71,689 – almost twice that of the national average.

Doomsday prophets of print media might be interested to find that in a number of key categories magazines did better than the Internet when it came to engaging rich, powerful people.

Magazines are the most pleasurable of all media to consume, business decision makers voted.

This is compared to the Internet, TV, cinema, newspaper, radio, direct mail, unaddressed mail and outdoor.

It’s the medium movers and shakers most look forward to, they think is “pretty cool” more than they think any other media is “pretty cool”, and they find that it inspires them the most often.

Magazine Publishers Association spokesman John Baker says even they were surprised with the results.

The results exceeded our expectations and are as relevant to Metro or NZ Geographic as they are to NZ Business or NZ Hardware Journal,” he says.

Most interestingly, magazines were found to be the media in which people found the ads most relevant to them.

32 percent of business decision makers said ads in this media are more relevant to them.

Newspaper was in second place, with 28 percent of the vote, and the Internet, with all its potential for extreme targeting, came in third at 16 percent.

Baker says they always knew that the editorial environment of magazines amplified the effectiveness of relevant advertising, but it had been hard to prove with the rise of digital, targeted ads.

“More recently this has been harder to argue given lack of reliable title based third party data along with massive fragmentation of channels.

“Our hypothesis was, digital has been a game changer in terms of time spent (given the various sub-channels of email, social, web) but  physical media would maintain its position in terms of influence.”

The other thing the Nielsen study has proven about ads in magazines that will read as an early Christmas present to magazine publishers is that of all the different mediums for communications, people dislike ads in magazines the least.

Both magazines and newspapers were voted as the least annoying ad providers, with 44 percent of business decision makers saying they “don’t mind the ads so much in this media”.

The worst offender when it came to pissing people off via advertising was direct mail, which was even beaten by it’s anonymous friend unaddressed mail by six percentage points.

There were only a few points where magazines didn’t come in first place with this group of wealthy, educated, decision makers.

Magazines came second to cinema when it came to giving oneself a “personal treat”.

Magazines were also rated really well, interestingly, on both the entertainment AND credibility scales.

They are second only to newspapers for credibility, and second only to tele for entertainment.

All statistics are from the Nielsen CMI Q2 2013 – Q1 2014.  

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